author: Beatles Unlimited Magazine July/September 2006
The various Latin music styles you would expect on a tribute album like this are mentioned inside the CD booklet and vary from well-known Bossa Nova and Samba to the unfamiliar Afoxe or Marcho Rancho (to name but a few). The album shows a broad interest in the Beatles repertoire, from This Boy to Dear Prudence and While My Guitar Gently Weeps. Completely new intros can often be heard before the well-known melodies pass by (And I Love Her). Except for I Want You, with a voice-over halfway and during the final part of the song, the album is fully instrumental. The instrumental line-up is rich in variety with lots of exotic instruments, the basis for both rhythmic and melodic (bass)guitar playing backed by stomping drumming and percussion. Perhaps the performance of the ballads is laid-back (although Eleanor Rigby has a very swinging finale after a short interval), they alternate with instant catchy rhythms in other tracks, during which you can't keep your hands or feet still.
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author: Terry Lawson
DETROIT DISC - Beatles songs get a Brazilian beat. Detroit Free Press Sunday, April 6, 2003.
The Beatles weren't entirely resistant to Latin rhythms - the popular ballad And I Love Her and a cover of the show tune Till There Was You were semi-sambas, and the gawdawful arrangement of the R&B plea Mister Moonlight was cha-cha by way of Chuck Berry. But while Beatles songs has been jazzed up, countrified, even classically modified, Brazil and Beyond is one of the only groups to have adapted some of the world's best-known songs to Tropicala.
Led by bassist Rich K, B&B, which include guitarist Frank Marinello, drummer Rob Emanuel and percussionist Dennis Sheridan, has been mixing Beatles (and Miles Davis and Wayne Shorter) tunes into it's sets of Brazilian standards during Friday and Saturday gigs at Dearborn's Big Fish. This album shows how cleverly they have been adapted and also proves the band's mastery of Brazilian styles.
Eleanor Rigby actually sounds fresh in its samba arrangement, while Rich K uses a Brazilian cavaquinho to plant the beat to opener Day Tripper and the ballad This Boy, performed as a choro. The disc's most enduring treat may be an afoxe approach to Come Together in which Sheridan addresses the melody on the berimbau, a tonal percussion instrument normally used to add exotic flavor. The overall flavor here is as lush as a rain forest.
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